From Barcelona to Portugal to Japan, how overtourism is causing chaos in summer 2024

Rising house prices, traffic and pollution, and poor water management, have angered residents from Lisbon to Kyoto as tourism surges in 2024

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Tourists at Kiyomizu-dera temple in Kyoto, where authorities have banned visitors from entering certain streets. With global tourism on track to break records in 2024, residents of some of the world’s most visited places are being left disgruntled as the crowds bring problems. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 4:15am, 30 Aug 2024Updated: 5:36am, 30 Aug 2024

The doorbell to Martinho de Almada Pimentel’s mountainside mansion in Sintra, Portugal, is hard to find, and he likes it that way.

Guests pull a long rope that rings a bell on the roof to announce their presence at this monument to privacy his great-grandfather built in 1914.

There is precious little of that for Pimentel during this summer of “overtourism” in what has long been one of Portugal’s wealthiest places, attracting visitors with its cool microclimate and scenery.

Travellers in standstill traffic outside the sun-washed walls of Casa do Cipreste sometimes spot the bell and pull the string “because it’s funny”, Pimentel says.

Martinho de Almada Pimentel at his mountainside mansion, Casa do Cipreste, in Sintra, Portugal. Photo: AP

With the windows open, he can smell car exhaust fumes and hear the “tuk-tuk” of outsize scooters, named for the sound they make.

He can also sense the frustration of 5,000 visitors a day who are forced to queue on the road that passes his house and crawl up single-lane switchbacks to visit Pena Palace, at one time the retreat of King Ferdinand II, the de facto first king of Spain.